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Mark is founder and CEO of eSales Hub. With a career spanning Hilton Hotels, Virgin, Esporta Health Clubs and Halford Autocentres, he's been in the local search industry for over 15 years, successfully growing both B2C and B2B businesses through local search. Two successful private equity ventures later and Mark started eSales Hub in 2013, growing the business to become the success that it is today.

Blog Comments & Posts

Tom, great blog. Convincing yourself that you need local pages as part of your strategy, not 'just' your strategy, is the first step. With 46% of Google search now classified as having local intent, it's a big category a lot of people miss. You do a really good job of explaining that - even if they haven't got a physical address in a location doesn't mean they can't target local searchers. Google even promotes it as a strategy to compete against competitors that have larger budgets as you can cut out a lot of the waste.

We find that properly done, local pages can get a conversion of between 25% and 35% (unique user to lead), and if you are putting ppc to the pages, you'll see CTR's of up to 11%.

However, the one thing I would add is that you need to measure the impact of your local pages. Google data shows 71% local searchers call as part of the transaction (mainly because its mobile device-led). So you must make sure you are tracking calls; not just the phone ringing but the sales you are getting so you can quantity the effort of local pages.

However, I think there's one point missing which is tracking the click right through to sale, even for an offline or in-person conversion. We developed our own analytics tool and the insight we get and the level of optimisation you can achieve on local search still amazes me. We have one client where who gets 38 times more sales from the main natural search results than their Google My Business and local carousel listings (they rank it the 3 pack for their top keywords). Whilst GMB shouldn't be ingnored, tracking and then optimising by sale for local search really does prioritise what you need to do to boost a businesses profitability.